As with the sect of Pythagoreans, virtue was defined to be a harmony, unity, and an endeavour to resemble the Deity,—so the whole life of man, they taught, should be an attempt to represent on earth the beauty and harmony displayed in the order of the universe. It was the doctrine of Pythagoras himself, that by action as well as by thought the individual as well as the state should represent in themselves “an image of the order and harmony by which the world was sustained and regulated.” But as Prior puts it, when he considers the heavens, the starry worlds of God’s ordaining, or ordering,— “How mean the order and perfection sought In the best product of the human thought, Compared to the great harmony that reigns In what the Spirit of the world ordains!” Lord Lytton suggestively pictures to us one of his characters alone in the streets by night, striding noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars; gaslights primly marshalled at equidistance; stars that seem to the naked eye dotted over space without symmetry or method—“Man’s order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker’s order, remote, infinite, is so beyond man’s comprehension of what _is_ order.” Chauncy Hare Townshend expresses the same idea in an address to the stars:— “Distance deceives the sight. Ye move and sway With life; yet are your hoverings on the brink Of ruin but the freedom and the play That binds your dance of beauty, link to link, In woven joy that shall not fail nor shrink. ... Thrones arise and sink, Earth is transformed beneath you: ye remain, Clasping distracted man with Order’s sacred chain.” So Wordsworth, addressing as it were a deified idea of Duty, pays this homage:— ... “Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, And the most ancient heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.” Well may Hooker speculate on what would become of man, were Nature to intermit her course, and leave altogether, though but for a while, the observation of her own laws; if the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted motions, and by irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture—“See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of Nature is the stay of the whole world?” Again to quote from “The Mystery of Evil,” the same star-gazer speaking:— “Do I not climb in you, O blessèd host, The way of symbols, shining steps to God? When most man knows you, he is certain most One law unswerving reigns from star to clod.”